Universities holding academic conferences are being targeted by bogus overseas applicants, who are just looking to obtain a visa into the country, Education Guardian can reveal.Okay, but say you're a grad student from a legitimate university with a legitimate advisor who thinks you will be at the conference -- but really you are only going to attend like one panel and then spend the rest of the week partying in Europe. That's still okay, right?
The bogus applicants attempt to register to attend conferences at UK universities in the hope of getting a letter from the university stating they are expected at the event. The letter would bolster the bogus applicant's request for a visa into the UK.
“I, as an academic, am accustomed to seeing buildings with names like Newton, Copernicus, Darwin,” said Ponzy Lu, a chemistry professor at the university. “Then to see the name of this person, who is very fresh in our memory, who is not associated with a pursuit of knowledge — a gossip columnist: it strikes me as being totally idiotic.”Not associated with the pursuit of knowledge? Why just today I have learned that Nicole Kidman gave birth to a girl, that Amy Winehouse's husband has been photographed taking drugs in jail, that Madonna's brother is writing an unauthorized expose, and that the Jonas Brothers are on tour. Sounds like certain stuffy professors could use a little gossip in their lives.
In one exchange, Ayers reports that a girl in his economics class comes from a broken home and wonders if she waits tables at a nude or topless bar on the weekends. He likes her “wide-eyed innocence” and “little girl set of mannerisms,” and the fact that she wears short shorts and low-cut tops to class.
Ayers calls her “totally dumb. That may explain her interest in me. Perhaps she has flirted her way through college to an A average,” according to a Feb. 16, 2005, e-mail.Um ewwwww. Ayers was fired last year, but a faculty tribunal actually ruled in his favor, overturning the president's decision.... so now it's up to the UT Board of Regents to make a final decision -- and they don't look like they care for porn.
“Let me find out her weaknesses, flatter her, and then dig out more info to use to my advantage later,” Ayers continued. “I make no predictions other than that I will get together with her. It's in the air.”
[Goldrick-Rab, 31] considers herself the “intellectual heir” of her senior colleagues — “It’s like working with your grandparents,” she said fondly. . .. . . in that you have to smile patiently while they tell you long stories about their heroic protests in the 1960s, and how kids today are selfish little shits.
The Chronicle has published a first person story by "Tom Quincey," a humanaties Ph.D. student who credits his success to all the weed he has smoked while in graduate school. For example, there was this one time when he wrote some notes for a paper while he was high, and then his professor said it could be published! He goes on for several paragraphs about how weed is healthy when compared to cocaine, heroin, binge drinking, and blah blah blah... but the best part is when he rationalizes his liberal guilt away:Of course I've often felt troubled, politically, by my marijuana use: Here I am in the comfort of my apartment while unfortunate people are incarcerated for selling it to me. That's a form of hypocrisy, and it's led me to donate money to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (Norml). I admit that's not much, but it's something.So he donates money to legalization advocates with zero political power. But once again... it's not like he's doing cocaine or something!!
By contrast, it's hard to imagine making a political virtue out of snorting coke. My impression is that habitual users simply don't care that they're indirectly wreaking havoc in Mexico and Colombia.Sigh. Like many people, I smoked weed in college and view it as mostly harmless, but I hate when people blather on about how drugs make them creative and productive. I also get annoyed when people rationalize the societal consequences of their behavior with lame and futile actions like donating to NORML.
An indictment returned today by a Massachusetts grand jury accuses two former Tufts University administrators of separately stealing from student-activity funds, wrongfully obtaining a total of nearly $1-million, and spending the money on such items as luxury and designer goods, resort vacations, and tickets to concerts by Madonna and Celine Dion.That was really worth risking your career? Really?
The ice-cream truck that circles the campus doling out free frozen treats (more than 500 to choose from!) is but one example. Another is live music in the cafeteria.According to the article, the faculty received 2% bonuses and new office chairs, and so they are okay with the transformation of their university into a high class resort where the administration is obsessed with making undergrads feel special.
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The chief concierge, Leslie Smith, takes care of maintenance requests, gives restaurant recommendations, and sends out dry cleaning, among other services.
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Each undergraduate . . . receives a birthday card from the university, signed by the president, with a Starbucks gift card tucked inside. Plus balloons.
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Snack kiosks are located strategically around the campus offering free bananas, pretzels, and drinks. Gifts await students in their dorms when they return from breaks. That's on top of the gifts they receive for no reason. The university keeps track of each student's preferences (movies, candy bars, sodas, etc.) so all of them get exactly what they want.
This is my final post as guest blogger and I must say that many of the responses demonstrate what’s wrong with higher education. . . For example, commenters called me, not just my ideas, for example, “off the deep end.”But Nemko was not discouraged:
I was struck by how the negative comments, even the ad hominem ones, rather than demotivating me, motivated me to try even harder in my rejoinders and in subsequent posts. That reminded me of all the people who say they were unmotivated until someone said, “You can’t.” or “You’re a loser.”Please don't leave us Marty Nemko. At least not until the fall when the academic year starts and I have something else to write about. In fact, I dare you to keep blogging for the Chronicle! I bet you can't! You're a loser.
The American Political Science Association has decided to hold the 2012 meeting in New Orleans despite complaints from gay and lesbian members:Lesbian and gay activists in the association say that a "defense of marriage" amendment approved by Louisiana voters in 2004 contains such severe language that they and their partners would face risks in visiting the state.Y'all, there is a big difference between New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana. Remember how certain members of the religious right actually blamed Hurricane Katrina on all the homosexuality in New Orleans (and the parties, strip shows, drunken sex, and general hedonism)? There is plenty of gayness in New Orleans, and as a lesbian I would be happy if my discipline held a conference there. It's the tweed-clad aging heteros who will feel a bit out of place.
One career college official . . . said that she has noticed a significant increase among 18- to 20-year-olds who are saying that they are enrolling because they couldn’t get into their desired nonprofit program. “A greater majority of our student body is saying that we were their third choice and that’s where they ended up,” she said.According to the IHE article, officials at the for-profits have come up with the idea of using military and weight loss recruiters to find students:
Given the difficulty military recruiters have in filling their quotas, Platt said that those who are successful would make ideal college admissions reps. He also cited research that says the reasons people don’t join health clubs are a combination of fear and laziness — and that a particular type of sales person is effective at reaching those people. That person is an ideal hire for a career college, he said. Audience members said that, for the same reason, those who sell weight loss programs are also effective at career colleges.In other words, people who are good at convincing hapless suckers to buy useless fad diets -- or, to sign up for endless tours in Iraq -- would be good at finding students for barely accredited programs that are looked down upon by all of academia. Maybe they should not have allowed press into this meeting?
I disagree with [Deresiewicz’s] contention that being elite-educated makes you incapable of talking with uneducated people. . . If you make the effort to keep your speech clear and concise, ask about things the person is likely to care about: e.g., family, friends, the Red Sox, and listen carefully, you’ll do fine.Examples:
Their message is clear; Indiana needs to offer people a good quality of life and a more sustainable community infrastructure to attract people and businesses.Can't get a tenure track job in a desirable location? Maybe you can bring desirability to your unfortunate location. You know, when life gives you balls, make a sustainable community infrastructure.
-- Craig Seymour, Ph.D., on stripping through grad school
For some reason I was under the impression that the popularity of Law and Order, CSI, and other crime solving shows had lead to an overabundance of eager grad students wanting to study crime... but according to an article in IHE, demand for criminologists currently exceeds the supply. Why the demand? Because undergraduates want to study crime... dangerous, sexy crime...Undergraduates flock to courses about crime . . . “Undergraduate enrollment is the coin of the realm,” Uggen said, and criminology courses produce the numbers with which a department chair can make “a much stronger claim to a faculty line.”So if nobody wants to read your boring family studies ethnography, consider studying criminals instead.
This month a company in Spokane, Wash., plans to release Shots Fired on Campus, an instructional DVD with strategies for preventing and surviving a gun rampage.
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The 20-minute video, filmed at Eastern Washington and Gonzaga Universities, begins with a student hiding behind a tree and calling 911 on her cellphone. "I'm on campus…" she says. "There's a guy here shooting."
“When the university made those decisions they were not applying the same standards all across the board,” says Dillon [president of Northwestern’s Black Alumni Association]. “This is where the lens of racism comes in. Rev. Wright is accused of committing a crime of being unpatriotic,” while Daley is accused of failing to act when learning that Black men were subject to real criminal offenses.The Black Alumni Association is also critical of Northwestern's declining black enrollment, which dropped to a pitiful 5.5 percent in 2005. The administration was admittedly fucked either way on the Wright issue thanks to their unlucky timing -- but they have not done enough to recruit and support black students at Northwestern, and there is no excuse for sucking at that.
Tim Russert’s untimely death from a sudden heart attack reminded me of the dramatic 50+-year-long gender disparity against men in health care research and outreach.Nemko claims that "for the past 50+ years, the overwhelming majority of health care research has been on women’s health" citing as evidence:
. . . when I searched PubMed . . . I found 22,304 articles with the keywords “women’s health,” but only 586 with “men’s health.”Holy crap... 97% of all medical research is about tits and ovaries? Now that is alarming... so alarming that you almost wonder if there is some huge and obvious logical flaw in his argument...
The new graduate student's lack of humility is a stunning thing, perfect, seamless, and unbreakable. They begin issuing their opinions to anyone who will hold still on the assumption that the benighted masses have just been waiting patiently for a clever graduate student to explain How Things Really Work.Why are grad students so arrogant? According to her "friend" with a Ph.D., the problem is that professors make them feel special... and so taking courses as a first year makes these students feel like hot shit:
For the first time in their lives, the students are treated like adults. They are in the outer circle of an intellectual elite, treated slightly more like members of the club than time-consuming nuisances. Their classes are smaller, and offer actual conversation with some big name professors. . . They start to feel like members of a special elite, privy to secret knowledge, cleverer than the normal run of people.
The new graduate student, bolstered by the opinions of their professors, tends to become extraordinarily indignant at the notion that anyone would challenge them.I don't know where McArdle's friend went to grad school, but I want to transfer. In my experience, most Ph.D. programs are a little less "Welcome to our elite club, oh brilliant first year," and a little more "Make my copies, bitch."
"Our study calls into question the effectiveness of self-regulation," the authors write...But it works so well in the corporate world!
Relying on the thesis of The Bell Curve—that intelligence, and therefore prospects for academic achievement, is determined by heredity—Mr. Murray’s new book argues that education policies should recognize that not all students can be expected to take high-level academic courses, and that some students should concentrate instead on vocational training to prepare for the workforce.But Murray doesn't think this book will be as controversial as The Bell Curve:
"This [new book] doesn’t deal with race,” Mr. Murray said. “Anything that does not deal with race doesn’t get as much blowback as something that does deal with race. ”Right, he's not saying that black kids should be steered toward the plumbing profession while white kids take college prep. He's just saying that "some people" should not aspire to higher learning because "some people" just aren't as smart as some other people... if you know what he means.
A group of Chilean teachers on Tuesday broke the security line of the government building and protested inside against the General Law of Education which is under discussion in congress.Some places are very different from here.
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The law, signed by President Michelle Bachelet and now submitted for congress's approval, sets out higher tuition fees for students and a selection process for public schools to choose students, which opponents said would be unfair for those families with lower incomes.
To hear many studentsYou see kids, academia may not pay, but at least you don't have to take on fuckloads of debt just to pay the tuition.
I wondered how the straight white male graduates must have felt. . . I wondered how many, in their heart of hearts, felt sadness or anger at being excluded.How were white straight men "excluded"? According to Nemko, all of the speakers were minorities -- except, well:
the retiring chair, a white man who said that his vision for the counseling department is to create a program in counseling the incarcerated, disproportionately minority.Race traitor! And:
... [a] professor handed out four student awards: three to Latinos and one to a white male who had been transgendered and did his thesis on transgender counseling.And whites who are queer don't fucking count.
Professors present an unusual problem when it comes to retirement: They actually like their jobs, and often do not want to leave them.These professors operate under the illusion that they are still productive and useful members of their departments past the age of 65, while younger academics try to lure them out of their prime office space and onto the golf course.
